Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North

Mark C. Serreze is director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, professor of geography, and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

He has spent decades studying the melting sea ice in the Arctic. In the 1990s, researchers in the Arctic noticed that floating summer sea ice had begun receding. This was accompanied by shifts in ocean circulation and unexpected changes in weather patterns throughout the world. The Arctic’s perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, was warming, and treeless tundra was being overtaken by shrubs.

Serreze writes about what happened in the 1990s and what’s happening now and its global implications in his latest book Brave New Arctic, The Untold Story of the Melting North.